Center for Human Modeling and Simulation

Current Projects

Graphics

Games

Human Factors

Systems

Recent Funded Reserach Projects

RCTA: The RCTA is a large, multi-year, multi-partner project to build effective, efficient, intelligent and collaborative human-robot teams. Our team plays two roles in this effort:

  1. Multi-Modal Communication. The task objective is to develop a multi-modal tactical communication protocol for human-robot communication, and enable the preprocessing of raw tactical and mission relevant communication data to inform Perception and Intelligence (e.g., world model, ACT-R). Additionally, this capability will directly support mission relevant shared mental models (SMM) and contribute to all communication aspects of the capstone vision.

  2. Dynamics of operating within a social and cultural environment. The objective of this task is to provide a real-time interactive simulation of (for example) a Middle Eastern populace exhibiting indigenous cultural factors and behaviors while interacting with a human-robot soldier team. The deliverables of this task will provide a readily authorable interactive virtual and visual test bed for soldiers and robots to experience and interact with a Middle Eastern populace and facilitate experimentation and collaboration in a visually, socially, culturally relevant setting. The results of this subtask will enable HRI to study behaviors and predictive models of HRT on realistic missions set in a virtual marketplace characteristic of the Middle East. Authoring and recording variations in the simulation will provide valuable synthetic training data for Perception research. Finally, the ability to provide an interactive populace will provide a valuable test-bed to exercise and prototype robot and team cognition and tactical capabilities. Long term goals include the use of planning methods to generate simulations with global narrative constraints and unanticipated events (user input), and introduce parameters to control culture and character psychology at the animation layer.

Future Research Directions

  • Parameterized Action Representation (PAR) for digital human embodied agent models

  • Crowd simulation

  • Digital human modeling software tools

  • Understanding the bi-directional relationships between human movement, natural languages, instructions, and communication

  • Archaeology and cultural heritage sites